A Dog Called Perth

by Peter Martin

  All the way down the mountain, we worried that Perth would follow us back to Boston. We also wondered how she would get on with the girls. She had no experience with children. We convinced ourselves that the beauty of the camp would satisfy her, that she would be safe until our return. The next day we were on the plane heading for England.

  7

  WE ARRIVED IN LONDON in mid-June and expected to be back with Perth by early September. London was thrilling. Its theaters, concert halls, museums and shops were inexhaustibly nourishing. I immediately got to work in the British Library, burying myself in eighteenth-century books and manuscripts. I was seldom happier than when I was doing that sort of thing. The smell of the ancient pages, the feel of the paper and the handwriting of famous authors all thrilled me. I regularly handled pages touched by John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, James Boswell, Dr. Samuel Johnson and others in the galaxy of English literature. Manuscripts still excite me after many years of handling them. Occasionally, I hopped on a train to Oxford University to do some reading at the Bodleian Library, in a richly decorated room called the Duke Humfrey’s Library which dates back more than five hundred years. Late in the evening, as the room grew darker, only a single light at my desk illumined my world. I imagined I was sitting there in the Middle Ages. I was in bliss and Florida seemed very far away.

  On weekends, my godmother and father’s sister, Auntie Kath, of whom I was very fond, welcomed us graciously, as she always did, to “Crossways,” her lovely, large nineteenth-century home outside London. Her magical gardens had been written up in several magazines. She ran her household with an elegance, correctness and precision that exuded a delicious sense of well-being. Every Sunday morning we took the train out to her for lunch, where in addition to the best roast beef available on the planet we would often find one of my expatriate uncles from Argentina or Uruguay who was also spending the summer “at home” in England.

  Auntie Kath was the only one of my father’s six brothers and sisters who remained in England after World War I. Having grown up in the city of London, where their father was a well-to-do butcher and respected alderman, in their twenties they were eager to leave the country, thinking the Promised Land lay across the sea somewhere. The eldest sister left for Italy and France, but led by my eldest uncles the rest made their way to Buenos Aires in the early 1920s. In no time at all, my uncles made a fortune in Argentina. My uncle Harry, the eldest, then invested in about 150,000 acres of the best cattle land in the country, raised prize bulls and built a mansion worthy of the Great Gatsby outside Buenos Aires. One of the wisest things he ever did was to sponsor the invention of the ballpoint pen by a Hungarian called Biro, from which he made another fortune. My father, who followed them to Argentina in the late ‘20s, was also a success, but he never made a fortune. I was born there more than a decade later, attended the best British school and spent my summer holidays next to an Uruguayan beach. I did not really live in South America but rather in a British world of South America, a youth of rugby, cricket, polo, teatime, English lawns and gardens, flannel shorts and school ties. The least wise thing my father ever did, after quarrels with Uncle Harry, was to rip me away from this golden boyhood and move to the United States when I was ten. There, absorbed in an American environment of baseball and ugly, heavy bicycles that I never understood, I grew up more roughly, gradually losing my manners and accent, my kinship with my uncles and aunts, and most of all my memories. Only a black photograph album in a Queen Anne desk in our pleasant but unremarkable house outside Chicago reminded me of my extinguished life. Like all immigrants, I was quickly homogenized and pasteurized into American life and culture. I was reinvented with jeans, cowboy guns, basketball and baseball and all the other culturally trans-forming elements with which America creates Americans.

  America educated me well, however, so I felt confident enough to chase after a Ph.D. More important to me than the degree, though, was English literature, the subject to which I decided to dedicate my life. Through the strong sense of place that illuminates it I was born again into British ways. In my imagination I could live there at last. So when Cindy and I first came to England, I had the strange but pleasing sensation of having been there before. Everything about it seemed natural and comfortable. And Auntie Kath, our family’s lone survivor in England who never contemplated leaving it though she easily could have done so for a sumptuous and luxurious life in Argentina, was there to welcome us.

  Outside my literary world in the British Library, that first week in London turned out to be a nightmare. One morning in our dingy bed and breakfast lodging north of London—this was our first experience with nylon sheets—the landlady brought us up a letter which had just been delivered from Vermont. The letter spoiled our summer. It was from Mrs. Roy. She wrote:

  We kept Perth for a few days, but she was obviously unhappy because she kept snapping at the girls. Nobody was actually bitten but it was clear we couldn’t keep her any longer. It was just too dangerous. I took her down to a farm about ten miles away where the fourteen-year-old son of the farmer, a friend of ours, agreed to take care of her, feed her and so on. I told him you would pay him when you got back. He had your dog for several days, but two days ago he phoned me to say that she had run away. They looked for her for a couple of hours but there is no sign of her. I’m sure you will understand that they can’t keep looking for her. They’re very busy on the farm and have more important things to do. The boy, Jonas, said that right from the start the dog tried to bite him. So he had to tie her up on an iron chain in their old barn. He was so scared of her that when he brought her food and water once a day, he had to put on leather gloves because he was afraid she would lunge at him. Every day she got nastier. I don’t understand how a little dog like that can frighten a big boy like that so much. I wanted to tell you as soon as I could. I’m sorry to give you such bad news but I’ve been too busy, too, to look for her. I hope you are having a good time in England.

  Sincerely yours, Agnes Roy

  A cold shudder shook us as we read this. We had a horrible feeling of loss and helplessness, of cruelty. Cindy began to cry.

  Then I had a surge of confused anger. I was irrationally angry with Mrs. Roy that she should take it upon herself to place Perth in the care of a fourteen-year-old boy completely unknown to us. I was also unfairly and bitingly angry with the boy who, it struck me, must surely be clueless about how to care for a dog and ended up being cruel to Perth. But most of all, I was angry with myself. Somehow I must have given Mrs. Roy the impression that we didn’t care that much about Perth, that we were happy to farm her off for a few months just so we could indulge ourselves in a holiday in England. That could have been why she felt she could shift Perth apparently casually to some farmer friends down the road. I imagined with fury how the conversation went between her and her friends when she called them up about Perth.

  “Hello, Bertha, this is Agnes up at the camp. Look, I’m calling because we’ve got an awkward little problem up here with a dreadful dog that a nutty couple left with us a few days ago. They were on their way to England and dropped her off here for us to deal with over the summer. They called me because someone had told them about our camp, that it was a great place for a dog, and so on. She’s a pretty beagle but these people neglected to tell us the fact that the animal is ill-tempered and snaps. The girls are terrified of her.”

  “For heaven’s sake, that’s terrible. Some people can be so unbelievably unfeeling about their dogs. What are you going to do?”

  “Bertha, you don’t think that Jonas could take her on, do you? He can tie her up somewhere and just be sure to feed her. The owners would pay him when they get back at the end of the summer. He might even take a liking to her, though I doubt it. That dog should be kept away from people, so I thought that on the farm she would be less likely to do anyone serious harm.”

  “Well, Jonas could use the money, that’s for sure. Okay, Agnes, bring the little terror over. We’ll find someplace
to keep her out back.”

  And thus, I told myself furiously, in such a cruel way the die was cast. I exploded.

  “This woman tells us about this as if she thinks it will cause us just a little sadness on our lovely holiday! As if we’ll quickly get over it. She should have called us before removing Perth to the farm—that’s why we gave her Auntie Kath’s number. And where does she take Perth? To some farm somewhere where a boy puts her in chains in a dark barn and she sees nobody except him once a day! For heaven’s sake, no wonder she became vicious. Leather gloves! What a clod! You would think a farmer would know more about dogs than that. This is terrible.”

  Probably the most unforgivable thing I did, to ourselves and Perth, was not tell Mrs. Roy that Perth had bitten people before. Here my guilt ran deep, though I could not then admit it to myself. When we were at the camp our backs were against the wall. We were running out of time and had to do something. If I had told Mrs. Roy that Perth had nipped people’s noses, she would never have accepted her. Anyway, I was convinced that the reason Perth did snap was that Ohio depressed her and she felt severed from the rhythm of natural beauties she had known in Cazenovia. On a mountaintop in Vermont I was convinced her mind and emotions would clear. Her true persona would be restored. What I shoved to the back of my mind were the legions of giggling, screaming girls she would have to endure. The camp was peaceful when we were there. It certainly would not have been once the girls arrived. Perth must have been horrified and unable to control herself. In her position, I probably would have snapped at the girls, too.

  My remorse and guilt swept over the brink into tears when I thought back to my own cruelty in the final minutes we were with Perth. Perhaps her misery, the real reason she threatened the girls, fed on her heartache over my harsh words to her, my pushing her aside with my foot. What did she think of me during those lonely, dark hours in the barn? She must have hated me. I felt like one who fails to tell a loved one how much he loves her until it is too late. No wonder she bolted. I imagined her lying battered and bleeding on the side of some road as cars whizzed by inches from her head.

  “Oh, she must have pined after us so much, poor dogge, all alone, day after day,” Cindy cried. “We’ll never see her again! We never should have come here and left her alone all that time!”

  But what were we going to do now? We tried to call Mrs. Roy for more details, but it was impossible to reach her. Then we talked to the airlines about rescheduling our flight so that we could return to Vermont right away and look for her. But the extra cost of returning home early was out of the question, far more than our meager budget would allow. Here we were in mid-June and our return flight was not until late August. There was nothing we could do but wait—and trust that Perth, wherever she had run off to, would have the intelligence and instincts to survive. The genius for finding her way and staying safe that she had shown all her life would now have to serve her as it never had before. We were three thousand miles away, she was in an area of the country completely unknown to her and she knew absolutely nobody to go to for food and shelter. At least it was summer and she did not have to contend with the severe New England winter. We sent up a mighty prayer for her.

  Our only comfort in the aftermath of this shock was Auntie Kath. On Sunday we took the train from Waterloo station out to Woking to have lunch at her gorgeous house in Hook Heath, just next to the New Zealand Golf Club. The roast beef dinner she gave us at her elegant table, with her beloved cook Mrs. Bostock serving us smilingly as she would at lunches like these for the next twenty years, and with Auntie Kath presiding magisterially and warmly at the head of the table, was balm for our emotional wounds. Over dessert we told her about Perth and that we were thinking of going home.

  “That would be silly,” she said simply. “I know you must be feeling miserable, but you’ve got work to do, Peter, and you’ve both made a big effort and spent a lot of money to get here. The pain will ease with time, and I would love to have you here in England with me all summer. Auntie Edna is arriving from Uruguay next week and she’d be most distressed to have missed you. Don’t do anything rash. Think about it for a week.”

  If we had heard this speech anywhere but in the lovely graciousness of her beautiful house and gardens we might not have listened. Everything there conspired to make us stay—the scent of lavender in the garden, the sun playing festively on the shrubs and trees, the exquisite meal, the comfort of being with my father’s favorite sister and the practical good sense that she urged on us. On top of that, I knew I had to finish my work at the British Library. We decided to stay but to keep an eye out for a very cheap flight home, perhaps in late July.

  And so the days and weeks passed. We moved out of our dingy flat into a brighter and cleaner studio flat west of London in Bedford Park. We worked in London during the week, taking in plays and concerts in the evenings, and relaxed with my aunt during the weekend. Auntie Edna arrived and for the first time in my life I luxuriated in having with me both my dear aunts at the same time. Cindy loved them both. These were sunny intervals in an otherwise dreary and dejected procession of days.

  On one of those Sundays, Auntie Kath made us an offer. She had planned on spending three weeks in Devon, in a small stone cottage belonging to a friend of hers who was away for the summer, but she had to cancel. Would we like to go instead? It would be blissful, she urged. The cottage was next to the ancient parish church in Sidbury, up the River Sid five miles from the sea, where the reddish cliffs loom mightily over the coast. It is a walker’s and cyclist’s paradise. I would have promptly dismissed the idea had I not made rapid strides with my research and discovered several forgotten manuscripts in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library that tied my whole study together perfectly. I could not believe my luck. In just a few days I felt I could wind things up. So, we accepted my aunt’s offer. After weeks of desolation, a few days of escape in a Devon cottage near the sea might just have a healing effect on us. We also keenly desired to taste the soft English countryside, which we still did not know. All I had to do down there for our keep was cut the grass.

  I still had not given up the idea of returning to Vermont early to look for Perth, though, and the next day in London, as fate would have it, I stumbled on an extremely cheap flight for one to Boston, leaving in the second week of our time in Devon. On the spot, I decided to take it. Auntie Kath was incredulous and disappointed, but as she often said to me, “You can’t live other people’s lives for them.” At least I could spend one week in Devon. I just had to go and look for Perth. In moments of fantasy, I could imagine finding her in the deep forests somewhere. Cindy would stay in Devon the entire three weeks and then return on our scheduled flight at the end of August.

  A few days later we were on the train heading southwest. By mid-afternoon we were installed in the cottage, on the edge of a small green facing the gray stone church in Sidbury. The village was like a picture taken from an enticing coffee-table book: small, thatched, colored with different shades of plaster, and quiet. The rolling hills enveloped us. We rented bicycles and began the next day exploring the area. Every day was sunny and for the entire first week we kept time only by bicycling, doing the rounds of the village shops and chatting with the proprietors and hearing the insistent tolling of the church bells. If life could be better than this, it could only be with the addition of Perth.

  8

  THE SUN SHONE BRILLIANTLY when I tore myself away from that summer idyll. As I kissed Cindy good-bye on the railway platform that afternoon, the sun seemed to mock me, tempting me to abandon my absurd plan. We had concocted a telephone strategy that would cost us nothing yet keep us in touch day by day. Every night I would call collect from a pay phone in Vermont and ask for Cindy. She would reply to the operator that Cindy was not home, and if I had no good news I would announce to the operator so that Cindy could hear, “Never mind, it’s not important.” If I did have news, I would say instead, “But I must give her some good news. Could you ask whe
n she’ll be back?” That would mean that the next time I called, Cindy should accept the call. But a transatlantic call in those days cost what seemed like a fortune to us, so if we were to talk to each other there would really have to be some good news.

  Reluctantly I stepped onto the train, stayed that night in our little flat in London and caught the morning flight to Boston. Cindy’s parents met me at the airport and took me to where I had left our car. They thought I had lost my senses. I barely paused, got in the car and drove out of the city toward Vermont. Just being back gave me hope. Somewhere within two or three hundred miles Perth was still alive. I was sure of it. My plan was to camp since I had all the necessary gear in the car.

  My first destination was the infamous farm. By talking to the boy I might get some hint of where Perth may have headed. It was a poor, tumbledown sort of farm sprawled out along the foothills of the Green Mountains. Jonas, the boy, looked so guilty and sheepish that I could not bring myself to get angry with him.

  “Yer dog is kinda mean, mister,” he began. “I didn’t wanna tie her up, but jeez, she cut me in my arm one time. My pa told me to get rid of that damned hound, but I wanted to see if she’d treat me better after a while. She stayed mean, though.”

  “How did she escape?” I asked him, coldly.

  “Yeah, that was kinda scary. I had her tied good and tight with a chain on the post. But darn if she didn’t go and chew right through that big post. Must of dragged the chain with her. You’ll never find her now, mister. It’s more’n a month ago it happened. She’s a goner. I’m sorry, mister, let me tell ya.”

  I paid the boy what I owed him and left, no wiser about where to begin looking for Perth. Things looked black. Depressed, without much hope, I found a field on a nearby farm and pitched my tent. I shared it with some cows. After a miserable meal in a greasy restaurant down the road, I fell asleep in the tent, exhausted and lonely. Cindy was back in the cottage in pastoral Devon. I was here in a scraggly field in some Vermont backwater, about to start looking for my dog for two weeks, my heart brimming with feelings of remorse over how I had treated her at the girls’ camp. I did not know a soul in these parts. The night was full of sounds as I listened from inside the darkness of my tent. There were dogs barking in the distance and some sounded a lot like Perth. Drowsily, I muttered, trying to rouse myself, “I must… I’ve got to … get up and see if that’s Perth”—but then I sank into a very deep sleep.